3 ms·

I really wonder how they made something like the windows2k interface in the 90's. Compared to that, today's interfaces are garbage. And this is especially true

by zwaps 3y ago

I really wonder how they made something like the windows2k interface in the 90's. Compared to that, today's interfaces are garbage. And this is especially true for the web or anything that is even remotely in contact with Javascript. Were UX/UI people and researchers in the 90's just better? More competent? More careful in their research? Did the objectives change so much from usability to selling clicks?

hedora 3y ago
It was standard practice back then to sit non technical and (separately) expert users in front of a product, film their reactions, and then adjust the product design until most of the swearing stopped. Gnome 2 famously did this. Gnome 3 famously threw out the findings, which is why Linux Mint exists, and how KDE (eventually) caught up on usability.
- lmm 3y ago
  Nah. KDE 3 was better than Gnome 2 in the first place. KDE 5 has almost recovered to that level.
- kps 3y ago
  GNOME is an interesting case, because you can't blame it (directly) on managers pushing dark patterns to maximize conversions. Is it all just trickle-down of user-hostile design philosophy from the commercial web?
amluto 3y ago
My take is that they had more limited tooling and resources, so they designed a set of controls, made them visually distinct, and used them almost everywhere. It was easy to make radio buttons that looked like radio buttons and worked like radio buttons. It was substantially more difficult to do anything else. Also, the default interface wasn’t composited, so nothing was translucent, so no one layered their controls and content. Sure, it looks kind of pretty in Material Design when a round button with nice antialiased edges sits on top of the content, but it’s terrible UX. In Win2K, if you wanted to do this, you either used “layered” windows (which were no amazingly slow that no one wanted to use them) or you had to go outside the Win32 library entirely and render the whole mess yourself. So designers mostly didn’t do this.
simulo 3y ago
No. People were not just "better" and I also think that the core motivation was and is making money. However, how companies earn money changed. In the 80s and 90s computers were marketed at professionals working in offices. Software was sold shrink-wrapped on disks. It was very costly to change software later (send disks?), you better tested it really, really carefully. The promise was often to make experts more efficient at their tasks: Software was customizable, had macro recorders and had a familiar interface of buttons, menus and docking sub-windows. Computers were used with keyboards and (finally!) mouse: Two very efficient input devices. People (including me) are nostalgic for that time, and that makes memory very selective: We probably remember the best software created by large companies with great teams. We also remember software created for specifically for professionals working with computers, many HN readers will be that people. And, last but not least, there were a lot of terrible UIs too, that we gladly forgot and for every fondly remembered non-standard, fun UI (bryce?) there are sooooo many terrible ones. A lot of what irks people can be explained with shifts in how software got made, for which audience and for which devices: Having many small teams working independently makes a coherent vision for a product more difficult (but has other advantages), user customization became less important since products were more targeted to non-experts and it also can mess with your automated testing; moving to the web as main way to deliver software meant that some types of interactions (drag and drop, using large amounts of data directly) were harder to create than others; on the web, advertisement and subscription models became popular, leading to very different ways to advertise software in contrast to the former "buy the bi-yearly upgrade in a big box" and the web was more OS independent so the old one-system, one UI-standard did not match anymore. So, a lot of what "got worse" can be explained by changes in the ecosystem that software-creation and software-use happens in and by the position of people that assume it "got worse". There are many things that I find worse now than in the 90s but this perspective can help to see if software got worse just for people similar to me and it can also help to find ways to make sustainable changes that fit the ecosystem that exists today.
- systemvoltage 3y ago
  I agree, good things still exist when it is B2B or only designed for a highly trained or professional users. But, when we need to design things for 80 IQ crowd, everything suffers. RGB lighting and diamond studded so to speak in UI/UX field.
taneq 3y ago
Same as the reason Visual C++ was so good: They made all the developers use it.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Except for WinDev, that is why we keep getting such bad tooling to deal with COM/WinRT, although the concepts behind it are great.

by zwaps 3y ago

hedora 3y ago

It was standard practice back then to sit non technical and (separately) expert users in front of a product, film their reactions, and then adjust the product design until most of the swearing stopped. Gnome 2 famously did this. Gnome 3 famously threw out the findings, which is why Linux Mint exists, and how KDE (eventually) caught up on usability.

lmm 3y ago
Nah. KDE 3 was better than Gnome 2 in the first place. KDE 5 has almost recovered to that level.
kps 3y ago
GNOME is an interesting case, because you can't blame it (directly) on managers pushing dark patterns to maximize conversions. Is it all just trickle-down of user-hostile design philosophy from the commercial web?

amluto 3y ago

My take is that they had more limited tooling and resources, so they designed a set of controls, made them visually distinct, and used them almost everywhere. It was easy to make radio buttons that looked like radio buttons and worked like radio buttons. It was substantially more difficult to do anything else. Also, the default interface wasn’t composited, so nothing was translucent, so no one layered their controls and content. Sure, it looks kind of pretty in Material Design when a round button with nice antialiased edges sits on top of the content, but it’s terrible UX. In Win2K, if you wanted to do this, you either used “layered” windows (which were no amazingly slow that no one wanted to use them) or you had to go outside the Win32 library entirely and render the whole mess yourself. So designers mostly didn’t do this.

simulo 3y ago

No. People were not just "better" and I also think that the core motivation was and is making money. However, how companies earn money changed. In the 80s and 90s computers were marketed at professionals working in offices. Software was sold shrink-wrapped on disks. It was very costly to change software later (send disks?), you better tested it really, really carefully. The promise was often to make experts more efficient at their tasks: Software was customizable, had macro recorders and had a familiar interface of buttons, menus and docking sub-windows. Computers were used with keyboards and (finally!) mouse: Two very efficient input devices. People (including me) are nostalgic for that time, and that makes memory very selective: We probably remember the best software created by large companies with great teams. We also remember software created for specifically for professionals working with computers, many HN readers will be that people. And, last but not least, there were a lot of terrible UIs too, that we gladly forgot and for every fondly remembered non-standard, fun UI (bryce?) there are sooooo many terrible ones. A lot of what irks people can be explained with shifts in how software got made, for which audience and for which devices: Having many small teams working independently makes a coherent vision for a product more difficult (but has other advantages), user customization became less important since products were more targeted to non-experts and it also can mess with your automated testing; moving to the web as main way to deliver software meant that some types of interactions (drag and drop, using large amounts of data directly) were harder to create than others; on the web, advertisement and subscription models became popular, leading to very different ways to advertise software in contrast to the former "buy the bi-yearly upgrade in a big box" and the web was more OS independent so the old one-system, one UI-standard did not match anymore. So, a lot of what "got worse" can be explained by changes in the ecosystem that software-creation and software-use happens in and by the position of people that assume it "got worse". There are many things that I find worse now than in the 90s but this perspective can help to see if software got worse just for people similar to me and it can also help to find ways to make sustainable changes that fit the ecosystem that exists today.

systemvoltage 3y ago
I agree, good things still exist when it is B2B or only designed for a highly trained or professional users. But, when we need to design things for 80 IQ crowd, everything suffers. RGB lighting and diamond studded so to speak in UI/UX field.

taneq 3y ago

Same as the reason Visual C++ was so good: They made all the developers use it.

pjmlp 3y ago
Except for WinDev, that is why we keep getting such bad tooling to deal with COM/WinRT, although the concepts behind it are great.